Bullets & Billets
Publication Language |
English |
---|---|
Publication Type |
eBooks |
Publication License Type |
Open Access |
Categories: Books, Open Access Books
Tags: 1914-1918, British, Personal Narratives, World War
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A Company of Tanks [Illustrated Edition]
?Steel, mud, blood and courage on the Western FrontThis is a fine book because it is a superb first hand eye-witness account of British Tanks in action throughout the First World War. Without much preamble Watson launches the reader, in company with the author?s brother officers, men and machines into the heart of the field of conflict on the 11th Corps forward line on the Western Front in the Autumn and Winter of 1916. From that point to the end of the book and the war itself the narrative takes us inexorably into the dark heart of war the tankers knew. Battles and battlefield experiences in their various phases (sometimes the book includes descriptions as expansive as three chapters each) are covered in engrossing detail. We join the author and the men we come to know as personalities, at First and Second Bullecourt, in much detail at Third Ypres and Cambrai before Amiens, the breaking of the Hindenburg Line and Second Le Cateau. This is a primary source work within a finite resource and as such is beyond value. Nevertheless, it is also a highly absorbing read to be relished by students of the period-professional and amateur alike. Available in soft cover and hard back with dust jacket for collectors.?-Leonaur Print VersionAuthor ? Major William Henry Lowe Watson, D.S.O., D.C.M. (1891-1931)Text taken, whole and complete, from the edition published in Edinburgh; William Blackwood, 1920.Original Page Count ? vii and 296 pagesMaps ? 8 sketch maps.
Cavalry of the Clouds
* 'Impossible to read these stories without amazement' THE SUNDAY TIMES. * Detailed day-to-day account of seven months Flying over the Western Front in the Royal Flying Corps in 1916. * One of the first memoirs ever published by an RFC airmen. GONE in war are the dash and charge and thunder of galloping horsemen, gone the flashing of naked sabres, the screams of stricken horses, the swooping down upon supply train or camp of the grey horse troop. Here comes the 'Cavalry of the Clouds' - the airmen of the Royal Flying Corps. Into the clouds they go, a dip, a swoop, a dizzy spiral, sometimes dodging shrapnel below the clouds, and sometimes eluding enemy machines above, until the German aircraft drops like a blazing comet into the lines, or until the precious information is safely delivered to headquarters. This is Alan Bott's memoir of his life with 70 Squadron, flying the Sopwith Strutter, a reconnaissance fighter, fitted with the RFC's first forward-firing synchronised machine gun at the dawn of aerial combat. Covering just seven months, June to December 1916, Bott details missions over the Western Front, including the Battle of the Somme, his three aerial victories and winning the Military Cross. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alan Bott was born in 1863 in Stoke-on-Trent. He worked as a journalist before and just after the outbreak of the First World War, including covering the British air raid on the Zeppelin factory in November 1914. He enlisted in 1915 and transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1916. He was awarded the Military Cross His war memoir was first published whilst the war still raged in 1917 as AN AIRMAN'S OUTINGS under the pseudonym 'Contact'. Later in the war he served in Egypt, where he shot down two more enemy aircraft becoming an 'ace' fighter pilot. He published a second volume of his memoirs covering this period as EASTERN NIGHTS AND FLIGHTS. After the war he founded Pan Books. He died in 1952. PRAISE FOR 'CAVALRY OF THE CLOUDS': 'Impossible to read these stories without amazement' THE SUNDAY TIMES; 'Enthralling' GLASGOW NEWS; 'A clear, well-expressed and vivid account of what flying on active service really is' ARMY & NAVY GAZETTE; 'All the exhilaration, poignancy, terror of his combats throb anew in his narrative... impossible to speak too highly of this book, either as an account of the fighting airman's experiences or as a literary performance' DAILY CHRONICLE.
Covered With Mud and Glory: A Machine Gun Company in Action (“Ma Mitrailleuse”)
The author of this book, SERGEANT-MAJOR GEORGES LAFOND, of the Territorial Hussars, was in South America at the time of mobilization. He returned to France as soon as possible and joined his corps, but asked to be assigned as intelligence officer to the machine-gun sections of the first regiment of Colonial Infantry.With this picked corps, which has been decimated several times, he took part in the engagements in Champagne, on the Somme, at Lihons, Dompierre, Herb?court, and notably in the days from the first to the fifth of July, where the regiment earned its second citation and received the fourrag?re.Lafond was discharged after the battles of Maisonnette, and wrote this book of recollections in the hospital at Abbeville, and afterwards at Montpellier, where he had to undergo a severe operation. Sergeant-Major Lafond?s narrative makes no claim to literary pretension, but it is simply a collection of actual occurrences. It is a series of short narratives which give the life of a company of machine gunners from the day of its formation to the hour when it was so decimated that it had to be reorganized with men from other corps.